Sun Microsystems famously grew from start-up mode to $1 billion in annual sales without spending one cent on advertising its products.

It established early on a reputation for good performance, good pricing, and the latest in a software environment that appealed to technically oriented users who were writing software, designing bridges, and taking over Wall Street with what was then a new category of "technical workstations."

The tall, sage figure of company co-founder and software genius Bill Joy was ubiquitous at relevant trade shows during the early days, giving a human face to this upstart company that eventually drove numerous larger firms out of this part of the business. Co-genius and hardware guru Andy Bechtolsheim was seen less often, but inspired equally with his soft-spoken mastery of the nuts and bolts.

Sun leveraged this success into larger systems that served networks of workstations, in increasingly sophisticated and complex applications. It spread its influence into all the major vertical markets, whether government, manufacturing, telecommunications, or retail. It became a legitimate competitor to industry behemoths IBM and Hewlett Packard.

Sun finally became large enough to force its fiscally conservative CEO Scott McNealy to start advertising. So it did. Some of its campaigns were direct and successful, others less so. Its initial efforts were in a pre-Web age, so it concentrated on focused, print advertising campaigns. It avoided expensive, diffuse TV advertising.

The one day, sometime during the 90s, Sun seemingly discovered television and Microsoft all at once. McNealy started railing against "the evil empire from Redmond." While railing against the "mainframe hairballs" presumably developed by its traditional competitors, he saved his most vitriolic and personal attacks for Microsoft and its chairman Bill Gates, once even noting that he was "sure that my child is better looking than his."

A stated libertarian, he most likely was terrifically offended by what he perceived as Microsoft's monopolistic market manipulation. Microsoft broke a compact, in McNealy's view it seems, by flouting the anti-trust codes of a federal government that he felt shouldn't be empowered to intervene among fair-minded competitors. But with McNealy seemingly believing that Microsoft was acting less than fair-minded, he became a proponent of federal action to mitigate what Bill and company were doing.

But McNealy's Microsoft-bashing didn't end there. He also seemed to believe that Sun's systems were legitimate competitors in the consumer marketplace to personal computers running Microsoft Windows. Sun was superior to Microsoft in every way, ran this view. No one should ever run a system based on Windows. To this day, Sun employees are strongly encouraged to avoid all Microsoft products and forbidden to run some of them, according to a recent report in the San Francisco Chronicle .

Meandering Marketing

What does all this have to do with Sun today? Nothing and everything. On the one hand, it is merely a digression about one CEO's seeming obsession with another CEO. On the other, it strikes to the heart of the matter of why I get so confused by a lot of Sun’s technology advertising and marketing.

McNealy's Microsoft obsession badly skewed the message his company should have been sending to its customers and prospects. This is not the only instance of this phenomenon. When Sun ran its first TV ad in the 90s, it featured an arrow flying through space in a circuitous route toward a target, finding the bull's-eye at the end of the commercial. "All the wood behind one arrow" was its theme.

Sun employees and vendors knew what this meant, but did anyone else? We knew that Scott was fond of using this analogy to describe how Sun would focus all of its efforts on a single, integrated hardware and software platform that was allegedly more powerful and effective than anything on the market. Don't get distracted with multiple systems approaches (as IBM and HP had in those days), but keep all the wood behind one arrow.

I am sure that at least 99.9 percent of the viewing audience had no idea of why this analogy was used and what it was supposed to mean. Good thing, by the way, because the arrow wasn’t very big or powerful, implying that its originator wasn’t, either. But the good news was that Sun either lacked the funds or the gall to run its opaque message more than once. The ad disappeared with very little trace.

Fast forwarding to the late 90s, one once again saw Sun's message on television, although this time the ads were hard to miss. The company had by now morphed up more than a magnitude to $10 billion in annual revenue and rising. It had ridden the dot-com boom by providing a large share of the servers that supported high-traffic websites and by benefiting from a ballooning stock price through media hype of its Java programming language.

Java, for which my marketing company had written a white paper concerning outlining its original, modest intent as a set-top box operating environment, was suddenly the universal solvent for all technology challenges and opportunities. Java had a simple, appealing name (in contrast to typically arcane-sounding programming languages such as C++ or Modula-3), which led to simplistically appealing coverage of its wonders as the driver of the dot-com age.

Mid-level marketing managers associated with it became overnight media superstars and Java was said to be the magic brew fueling the Worldwide Web.

All of this resulted in Sun deciding to position itself as "the dot in dot-com." Any Marketing 101 professor will tell you neither to position yourself to narrowly if you don't have to nor to attach yourself to something so new and exciting that its tenability could be suspect. Undaunted, Sun decided that it had latched onto the perfect message, that by "attaching our grappling hook to the dot-com rocket," in McNealy's phrase, it could now tout its success to the masses.

One little problem I had with this campaign was that it seemed to kill its customers: the TV campaign featured a bunch of what appeared to be a nice enough, properly diverse group of youngish execs sitting around a standard-issue boardroom table, only to suffer apparently lethal electrical shock as Sun's omnipotent "dot" invaded their space and blew them away.

This again resulted in a message that was a.) unclear in defining the company's benefits, b.) vacuously incautious about the underlying message it was communicating.

What Now?

When dot-com became dot-bomb, Sun was shown to have no aplomb. Revenues started to disappear as its narrowly cast message proved worthless to technology buyers looking for value and flexibility rather than glibness and hubris. McNealy's continued rants against Redmond, breezy assurances that Java is the answer for everything, and insistence on non-starters such as StarOffice should blow Microsoft Office out of the water did nothing but turn Wall Street, analysts, and customers off.

I'm the same age as Scott, and trust me, I don't use the same lines in any conversation that I used in my 20s. They haven't worked for years!

CIO, CTO & Developer Resources

Many years ago I had the experience of being involved in negotiations with Ed Zander, the former Sun COO and man often given credit for managing Sun's rapid growth with assurance. The negotiations with Zander, now CEO of Motorola, were unpleasant, brisk, and productive. This man was probably no fun at a beer bust, but he was very clear about what Sun would agree to, and how fast the clock was ticking.

It's my opinion that Zander's leaving was the clearest sign that the glory days are gone forever. His management style was well-known to be brusque, and the results the company achieved under his leadership were extraordinary. You didn't hear visionary gibberish or frat-boy insults from Zander.

I have not had the pleasure of interacting with Sun's new COO Jonathan Schwartz. But it seems he's coming from the visionary side of things, and what Sun needs more than anything right now is an operations savant, because there are numerous reasons not to give up on Sun:

There are ridiculous numbers of good uses for Java, and there's no reason for me to detail any of them, as you can find all you need to know in JDJ's regular features and columns.

I've been working with a group of people on developing e-government initiatives, and we like Solaris, because it's Unix - it has been able to let more than one person at a time do more than one thing at a time since dirt was young.

On the hardware side, I still think that when you have a transaction-intensive, real-time application that Sun's iron still sets the price/performance benchmark. (We're staying away from the Dell/Linux combo for now, because we don't want to deploy legions of fungible boxes, we want to deploy a few high-value boards, and we don't like the dark side of Moore's Law, which says all your Wintel/Lintel iron is obsolete in three years. And we're starting to worry about heat, too.)

Sun employs large numbers of highly intelligent vertical market specialists who understand the specific needs, on a global basis, of their customers.

Yet these great technologies and great people are continually hamstrung by a CEO who believes StarOffice will overtake Microsoft Office and by squadrons of marketing communications managers whose simple goal is to "stay on message," no matter how irrelevant, tangential, or condescending the bullet points in that message are. If you are someone who never gets tired of hearing "proven," "best-of-breed," "cost-effective," or "taking the surprise out of business solutions," then contact Sun and demand as much of their current marketing material as they can muster.

A House of Mirrors

A good example of Sun's current marketing-think is provided by a survey I recently received from Sun that asked me to associate a bunch of canned euphemisms with a particular company. Since this survey wasn't blind, i.e., I was told that it was sent to me by Sun, the punches in this thing were telegraphed a la George Foreman in 1974. The survey even had the gall to ask whether I (and other survey takers) had heard of the phrase, "the network is the computer," and if so, what company that was associated with.

I guess if most people answer those questions correctly then the survey will prove that Sun has been "right" all along, and that there's nothing wrong with the company's performance. "Oh, that's right, the network is the computer and Sun invented that phrase. Say no more, I'll buy your proven solutions with best-of-breed technologies to take the surprise out of my business solutions and maintain competitive advantage in a cost-effective manner!"

This survey seemed to be an effort to deliver a pre-conceived package of customer input that would simply reinforce obtuse prejudices held by top management. It did nothing to ascertain how its customers actually feel about Sun and its standing among its competitors.

Detroit failed in the 70s because the execs looked out their windows and saw nothing but American cars. The threat from Japanese companies was not part of their world, so they missed it. Sun is going to fail in this decade if it does nothing but send out surveys to customers asking them to validate marketing phrases of Sun's creation.

If Sun management will not seek the underlying causes of why IT buyers would buy stuff from other companies, it will miss the threat from other companies. It's one thing to obsess about competitors; it's quite another to find out why they are causing you trouble and then honestly figuring out how to do something about it.

So readers of JDJ can continue to debate the arcane technical merits of Java specifically and Sun technology in general, as they should. But if they're smart, they'll be careful about staking too much of their own careers on a company that has lost its way and shows few signs of being the market leader it was for many years. Brashness and bravado are cool if the company knows how to love its customers and fight its competition. Otherwise, that and two bucks will get you a cup of old-fashioned java at the corner Starbucks.

Roger Strukhoff (@IoT2040) is Executive Director of the Tau Institute for Global ICT Research, with offices in Illinois and Manila. He is Conference Chair of @CloudExpo & @ThingsExpo, and Editor of SYS-CON Media's CloudComputing BigData & IoT Journals. He holds a BA from Knox College & conducted MBA studies at CSU-East Bay.

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Most Recent Comments

gmajor09/22/04 04:02:48 AM EDT

I am a frequent reader of Jonathan Schwartz' blog, and one of his constant themes/rants is that the open source community respects IBM more than it deserves.

In my opinion, other companies (i.e. Sun) are jealous of IBM's unique position and would like nothing more than to ruin that relationship.

IBM, while not entirely faultless, has taken a huge risk in tying some of its business and marketing campaigns to the success of Linux. Even while having AIX. I wish the same could be said for Sun. Glad to see it's paying of for IBM, in the form of profits and community goodwill.

Personally would like to see Sun re-invent and stay around. They have
contributed so much to IT industry. Is shame they haven't found good formula
for making money on such innovations as Java. If they could somehow get
rewarded for the immense value Java provides to all that use it for their
living, then Sun would be very successful. But free software expectations
fostered by the open source movement has created the mindset that it's
unethical to charge money for software innovation.

Inglenook09/21/04 04:02:40 AM EDT

From the article:

"On the hardware side, I still think that when you have a transaction-intensive, real-time application that Sun's iron still sets the price/performance benchmark."

I don't know which hardware is being considered here, but in recent times Sun's Sparc based hardware has been taken to the cleaners in price/performance terms by the competition. Forgetting the Intel based servers, the HP Itanium systems and the IBM Power based systems have outclassed Sparc systems for some time. Even the best Sparc systems are not made by Sun - Fujitsu has that honour.

I wish there would be more articles like this one in technical magazines. Bravo!

Kainaw09/20/04 07:20:57 PM EDT

"It's jargon and buzzwords and nothing more."

That is mostly correct. Decision makers do get deaf to words they hear too much. But, tech marketing is also a numbers (or versions) game. For instance, is Company A's Superpro 1700 better than Company B's Megapro 1600? The people making decisions don't know what the numbers mean. That marketing hype is in all areas of hardware from the computers to video cards and monitors (my 19" LCD has a screen that is actually 17" - but the casing is 19"). It is also in software - just look at IE and Netscape's version jockying in the past.

jimfulton09/20/04 07:18:13 PM EDT

[Marketing] Will never understand Technology.

Only for poor marketers and poor technologists.

Good technology marketers often start out as as engineers who find they have a passion for evangelizing their creations. Similarly, the best technologists make the biggest impact on the world often because they are able to get people to immediately understand the value of what they create.

The "field of dreams" approach usually ends up giving you a pile of dirt covered with weeds.

StCredZero09/20/04 07:15:30 PM EDT

Deciding if marketing-speak is BS based on buzzword matching/frequency counting is just sinking to their level. It's as devoid of semantics and real thought as buzzword matching to do hiring. After all, there's always a marketing/engineering disconnect, so this will likely tell you zilch about the technology.

If you want to evaluate a technology, evaluate the technology -- ignore all of the marketing. Be empirical. Actually play with the technology. If they won't let you get your hands on it, then be suspicious.

Responding to the original post, that's right if you define "maturity" for an industry to mean "the point at which a significant fraction of those involved don't understand what they're saying and just pass along marketspeak like neurons in a big brain processing signals."

ThogScully09/20/04 07:07:44 PM EDT

The job of a marketing department is to control the marketing. They can't be the reason for technology lagging. Technology will lag when those responsible for it stop improving it. Marketing will still try to hype the technology even if it is faltering and that's their job.
-N

MHleads09/20/04 06:59:19 PM EDT

It is a small favor IBM can return, given the fact that IBM has earned more dollars with Java than Sun.

SpaceLifeForm09/20/04 06:58:14 PM EDT

It's too late. Sun has already gotten in bed with MS.

b1t r0t09/20/04 06:57:05 PM EDT

Or even Apple. It would be interesting to see what comes out the rear end if you try to merge Solaris and OS X.

El_Ge_Ex09/20/04 06:56:00 PM EDT

The best thing that could happen to Sun is for them to go under and IBM buy the assets. The last thing the industry is for the same people that ruined Sun to ruin IBM as well.

smartin09/20/04 06:54:29 PM EDT

The best thing that could happen to Sun is for IBM to buy them. It would IBM give them access to Java, they could merge Solaris, AIX and Linux, and Sun hardware would probably sell better than the equivalents in the IBM line.

Beryllium Sphere09/20/04 06:53:12 PM EDT

Talking to your existing customers works fine in a static market. You can still win even if the technology is changing but the customers remain the same. "The Innovator's Dilemma" pulls a lot of material from a large study of the disk drive industry. Incumbent players stayed in business through radical changes in technology, dying only from changes in the market.

Changes in the market happen when a "disruptive" technology comes along. "Disruptive" doesn't mean you have to rip out your assembly line: the disk drive makers succeeded at that several times. "Disruptive" means something that redefines the market.

The personal computer is a clear example. Like other disruptive technologies it was cheaper than what was already there, sold to a different set of customers, and wasn't as good (*at first*) as the incumbent technology. DEC's customers continued using VAXen to do work that wouldn't fit on the first personal computers.

Then the new customers buy in volume, mass production drives down the price, high volume pays for improvements, and before you can say "386" the disruptive technology is undermining the old technology. Companies like DEC wind up selling "proven" solutions to a shrinking customer base. Eventually they die.

"Marketing", in its highest and most useful form, involves getting into the heads of your customers and understanding what they need before they know it themselves. But the future lies with people who are not your customers.

The book listed other examples including hydraulic earth-moving equipment, but the principle was the same.

hab13609/20/04 06:46:48 PM EDT

"Sun is going to fail in this decade if ...."
Uh.... didn't Sun fail last decade??

Nope, I looked outside, and The Sun(tm) is working perfectly! In fact, I used too much of The Sun(tm) over the weekend and it seems to have given me a nasty burn.

I hate The Sun(tm) now.

turgid09/20/04 06:43:56 PM EDT

who the hell installs a NEW Sun system these days?

Well, the Sun Opteron [sun.com] boxes [sun.com] are selling like hot cakes. The sales of UltraSPARC kit has increased by several 10s of percent in the last couple of quarters, so I suppose one or two people must be installing new Sun kit.

If we believed everything intel and HP were trelling us, we'd realise that every 64-bit platform other than itanic [theregister.co.uk] is doomed since itanic is taking over the world [theregister.co.uk] and resistance is futile [theregister.co.uk].

But then what would I know?

Archangel Michael09/20/04 06:33:38 PM EDT

Marketing Speak is the SYMPTOM of the problem. The problem is much deeper. It is an indication that the industry has stopped using NEW ideas to create better products, or new products never seen before. It is a sign of a Mature Market.

How can you decide between the $9.95 mouse and the $11.95 one? Buzzwords and Marketing Technobabble.

Or as one of my professors pointed out. When he asked his wife why she like one Fridge over another, she replied that she like the Handle. Everything else was the same in her mind.

Cocteaustin09/20/04 06:31:42 PM EDT

This isn't the fault of technology marketers. It's the fault of technologists.

Technology marketing at its best involves telling stories about technology to customers. It's as simple as that. Every time a technologist turns up his nose at a marketer, it makes it more difficult to tell that story. Even if you accept the fact that "engineers! are not good! at communicating! with customers!!!" it's still a fact that in the absence of input from engineers, marketers will be forced to fall back on meaningless cliches in their stories about what you build.

So you know where I'm coming from, I'm a developer-slash-marketer working for a Silicon Valley company you've heard of -- I spend part of my time writing code examples for developers and another (small) chunk of my time writing and editing marketing copy.

Breaking down the barriers between the geeks and the suits is something I've gotten very good at in the last few years. And here's a hint for geeks -- the suits are generally intimidated by you, which means it's your job to reach out to them and make them feel valued.

cthrall09/20/04 06:30:04 PM EDT

> But it isn't just Sun, surely.

There's dumb marketing everywhere.

But Sun could have the best marketing on the planet and still not be selling their products (hardware and OS), which have been largely commoditized. Yes, they have high-end servers...but years ago, cheaper Intel/AMD boxes weren't considered "server-class" hardware like they are now.

There is a larger issue: Sun's ability to "pull an IBM" and figure out how to leverage the changing software/hardware world instead of defending their market share.

genka09/20/04 05:40:28 PM EDT

I never buy anything advertized with words "magic", "miracle", "revolutionary", "incredible", "amazing". It helps to avoid all kinds of junk.

Bill Pechter09/20/04 05:09:02 PM EDT

Sounds a lot like DEC which was where I worked.
The one operating system idea was based on VAX/VMS back then.
DEC dropped the technical and educational product sales (from the PDP10 and 11 days) in favor of an attempt to sell to corporate IT types against IBM and gave up their OEM business in a push to do...

They kept the MicroVax non-oem so it couldn't be built into machinery making a market for Motorola's 68k chip (which begat Sun's workstation). Sun's not a software company, regardless of what they say. They're a systems company and systems software. They're more like DEC than they'll admit.

Sun's now repeating DEC's mistake... They're chasing the large server market against IBM and HP and getting pushed with low price/margin ia32 (x86) stuff from Dell and others. They've got to get their act together to sell into the low end market. There are thousands of Dell servers out there powering the internet which would've been Sun boxes if the price performance of the Netra boxes matched the Intel ones.

They've gotten fat on the Telco market on high margin DC powered NEBS compliant boxes -- since their competition isn't too strong in that area. In AC powered internet stuff they've gotten their clocks cleaned by 1u and 2u DELL and IBM boxes.

meburke09/20/04 03:25:30 PM EDT

I used to sell Sun back in the mid-90's and I believe their problems run much deeper than just the language. In fact, I re-read Goldratt's "The Goal" and "It's Not Luck" occasionally, and Sun is one of the first companies that comes to mind for the the examples of things they DIDN'T/DONT do.

Calling Scott McNealy "fiscally conservative" is an understatement. During the mid-90's the local Sun office was devastated by workforce reductions and obsessive focussing on "headcount". Tech help was scarce, and morale was as low as I've seen in an office for a high-quality product. They moved from a well-organized top-floor office to a mediocre government-looking office across the street.
You can only cut cost so far. You could cut costs to zero, and then where do you go to improve profitability?

Sun never made it easy. The manuals were good for techs (although the first editions of some of the Solaris 6 and NIS manuals had major errors in them), the classes were great, but the customer focus was fuzzy and confused, just as the article said. And God help any unsuspecting IT manager who thought he could just load Solaris as easy as loading Windows! My impression was that the frustrations over the complex installation and administration process were major avoidable pitfalls in the Sun marketing plan.

Luckily, I was mostly selling against NT 3.51 and had a major performance advantage at the time. The problem is, loading, configuring and administering Solaris is still a tedious, joyless task, even if it's done over a network. Troubleshooting administrative problems is not as easy as it could be, and the docs still suck.

Jargonaut09/20/04 02:38:31 PM EDT

That's nothing. "Food" has now fallen by the wayside, to be replaced, I kid you not, by "Meal Solutions."

Don't believe me? See for yourself.

Scary or what?

Marketingspeak09/20/04 02:02:59 PM EDT

The one I loved to hate was when a company I once worked for offered "time-compressed solutions."

I guess "we do it fast" just wasn't classy enough.

daniel09/20/04 02:01:26 PM EDT

This narrow read format is ridiculous. I just coudn't bear reading this article.

anon09/20/04 01:10:39 PM EDT

Sun has been on a downward slide for a while. This article is too little too late.

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In his session at Internet of Things at Cloud Expo | DXWor...

Everything run by electricity will eventually be connected to the Internet. Get ahead of the Internet of Things revolution. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Akvelon expert and IoT industry leader Sergey Grebnov provided an educational dive into the world of managing your home, workplace and all the devices they contain with the power of machine-based AI and intelligent Bot services for a completely streamlined experience.

In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Carl J. Levine, Senior Technical Evangelist for NS1, will objectively discuss how DNS is used to solve Digital Transformation challenges in large SaaS applications, CDNs, AdTech platforms, and other demanding use cases. Carl J. Levine is the Senior Technical Evangelist for NS1. A veteran of the Internet Infrastructure space, he has over a decade of experience with startups, networking protocols and Internet infrastructure, combined with the unique ability to iterate use cases, bring understanding to those seeking to explore complicated technical concepts and ...

Special thanks to Brandon Kaier (@bkaier) for his research and thoughts on the Digital Twins concept.
Unilever, one of the Consumer Package Goods (CPG) industry’s titans with over 400 brands and annual sales greater than $60B, recently bought Dollar Shave Club for $1B. Now normally I would not think twice about such an acquisition, peanuts in the world of mergers and acquisitions.
However, this one feels different.
Two billion people use Unilever products every day according to Unilever’s 2015 annual report. Dollar Shave Club only has around two million members; the vast majority of w...

From government to retail to oil and gas, it seems like everyone is exploring how to use AI in their industry or business. It’s time for you to do the same.
There’s no question that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on a lot of people’s minds these days, and is beginning to grow rapidly in adoption. Quoting Accenture, Forbes reports AI-driven productivity gains of perhaps 40% by 2035, and publications like the New York Times are noting the buzz, even as they ask, why now? Even if you don’t think you’ll be adopting AI for yourself just yet, you need to at least consider the broader impact the te...

There is a war a-brewin’, but this war will be fought with wits and not brute strength. Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s declaration that “the nation that leads in AI (Artificial Intelligence) will be the ruler of the world,” the press and analysts have created hysteria regarding the ramifications of artificial intelligence on everything from public education to unemployment to healthcare to Skynet.
Note: artificial intelligence (AI) endows applications with the ability to automatically learn and adapt from experience via interacting with the surroundings / environment. See the b...

"IBM is really all in on blockchain. We take a look at sort of the history of blockchain ledger technologies. It started out with bitcoin, Ethereum, and IBM evaluated these particular blockchain technologies and found they were anonymous and permissionless and that many companies were looking for permissioned blockchain," stated René Bostic, Technical VP of the IBM Cloud Unit in North America, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

So data warehousing may not be cool anymore, you say? It’s yesterday’s technology (or 1990’s technology if you’re as old as me) that served yesterday’s business needs. And while it’s true that recent big data and data science technologies, architectures and methodologies seems to have rendered data warehousing to the back burner, it is entirely false that there is not a critical role for the data warehouse and Business Intelligence in digitally transformed organizations.

Since releasing the University of San Francisco research paper on “How to Determine the Economic Value of Your Data” (EvD), I have had numerous conversations with senior executives about the business and technology ramifications of EvD. Now with the release of Doug Laney’s “Infonomics” book that builds upon Doug’s EvD work at Gartner, I expect these conversations to intensify. In fact, I just traveled to Switzerland to discuss the potential business and technology ramifications of EvD with the management team of a leading European Telecommunications company.

Coca-Cola’s Google powered digital signage system lays the groundwork for a more valuable connection between Coke and its customers. Digital signs pair software with high-resolution displays so that a message can be changed instantly based on what the operator wants to communicate or sell. In their Day 3 Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Chambers, Global Group Director, Digital Innovation, Coca-Cola, and Vidya Nagarajan, a Senior Product Manager at Google, discussed how from store operations and optimization to employee training and insights, all ultimately create the best customer experience b...

A strange thing is happening along the way to the Internet of Things, namely far too many devices to work with and manage. It has become clear that we'll need much higher efficiency user experiences that can allow us to more easily and scalably work with the thousands of devices that will soon be in each of our lives. Enter the conversational interface revolution, combining bots we can literally talk with, gesture to, and even direct with our thoughts, with embedded artificial intelligence, which can process our conversational commands and orchestrate the outcomes we request across our persona...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Evatronix will exhibit at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Evatronix SA offers comprehensive solutions in the design and implementation of electronic systems, in CAD / CAM deployment, and also is a designer and manufacturer of advanced 3D scanners for professional applications.

This month, an AI (artificial intelligence) system passed a medical exam in China for the first time. I wonder how its bedside manner will be? In addition, Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to a robot named Sophia. With all these rapid advancements, I think it is time we explore the spiritual life of robots.
Up till recently, programmers coded and configured algorithms, AI, automation and machine learning system and took personal responsibility for all the code. Today, however, AI has escaped the confines of human oversight and has been empowered and employed to self-program, self-optimize, ...

The Federal Communications Commission announced that it will vote on December 14 to enact the exceptionally misleadingly titled “Restoring Internet Freedom” order. If passed, it will do the opposite of restoring anything resembling freedom — it will repeal the current net neutrality rules which were enacted to ensure that Americans would have equal access to the Internet.
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re already interested in the topic. Still, some quick background:
Renamed “Open Internet” a while back, net neutrality provided a regulatory framework that specifically prohibited:...

Digital technologies have altered how people and businesses interact. The potential for dislocation from ongoing digital transformation has created unprecedented levels of C-suite discussion. The decisive market leaders have heeded the warnings and taken bold actions.
That said, if you’re one of those Chief Technology Officers (CTO) that previously responded to this scenario by making small incremental adjustments to your IT agenda, then you’re potentially at risk. Any relief from those prior tweaks tend to be short lived. The same issues will likely resurface.

Over the last few years, the Internet of things (IoT) has become a trending phrase for consumers and a top priority for businesses embarking on their digital transformation. Even with the growth and interest in IoT however, the meaning can still confuse people.
So, what is IoT? IoT is a network of things connected to the internet and is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system. These “things” may include a variety of devices like home appliances, commercial vending machines, fitness trackers, industrial gateways, connected cars, and smart factories.

I love it when I get feedback from a blog that I’ve written. I appreciate the different perspectives and insights that others bring to a topic of interest. And no blog that I’ve written has drawn more comments than my blog, “Isaac Asimov: The 4th Law of Robotics.”
The section of the blog that fueled the most comments stem from a scene in the movie I, Robot where Detective Spooner (played by Will Smith) is explaining to Doctor Calvin (who is responsible for giving robots human-like behaviors) why he distrusts and hates robots. He is describing an incident where his police car crashed into anot...

The human work of solving problems, facing challenges and overcoming obstacles tends to share a common goal: creating stable, secure and predictable environments. The tendency for most humans is that once we solve a challenge, we want to be done with it. That propensity, however, does not fit with today’s reality of perpetual change.
In the digital business world, organizations have no choice but to operate in an unclear, uncertain and continuously shifting environment that requires a new mindset and approach to formulating business strategies. Digital winners recognize that change is pa...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Google Cloud has been named “Keynote Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Companies come to Google Cloud to transform their businesses. Google Cloud’s comprehensive portfolio – from infrastructure to apps to devices – helps enterprises innovate faster, scale smarter, stay secure, and do more with data than ever before.

Cloud Expo | DXWorld Expo have announced the conference tracks for Cloud Expo 2018. Cloud Expo will be held June 5-7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York City, and November 6-8, 2018, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA. Digital Transformation (DX) is a major focus with the introduction of DX Expo within the program. Successful transformation requires a laser focus on being data-driven and on using all the tools available that enable transformation if they plan to survive over the long term. A total of 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a generation ago are now out of busin...

Digital Transformation is amplifying mainframe as mission critical to business growth more than ever before. With 70% of the world's corporate data and over half of the world's enterprise applications running on mainframe computers, they are at the core of just about every transaction. A single transaction can, in fact, drive up to 100 system interactions. The continued increase in mainframe transaction volumes, growing on average 7-8% a year for 78% of customers, has even led to a new buzzword: The Connected Mainframe.

"Evatronix provides design services to companies that need to integrate the IoT technology in their products but they don't necessarily have the expertise, knowledge and design team to do so," explained Adam Morawiec, VP of Business Development at Evatronix, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.